Random thoughts on a Saturday morning
Remember that ebola post I wrote several months ago (see below)? Isn't it funny that we heard absolutely NOTHING about ebola in the United States immediately after the elections took place?
Nothing, At. All.
At least nothing from the major mainstream news sources (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN). If you wanted to hear anything about the ebola epidemic in Africa, you had to really dig for information. It's not as if it was over, either. Though the situation seems to be under control in Liberia, the last I checked it was still a serious problem in Sierra Leone.
Now all we hear about is something called "DeflateGate." Suddenly, The biggest news in the United States are footballs that weren't properly inflated in the AFC championship game (Super Bowl semifinal for anyone who doesn't follow American football) between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The 24-hour news networks like CNN have been treating this ridiculously overblown and ultimately unimportant story like it was a world crisis.
This is the screwy world we live in.
***
I sort of made a new year's resolution to try and get the hell off my phone and read more books, like the old days before, let's say, 2010. To that end, I started reading Don DeLillo's White Noise, a book I've heard lauded for years. Somehow, the book came up somewhere in conversation (perhaps a podcast I was listening to). Well, it's very good. Quite funny. A biting satire of the absurdity of academia (so far anyway--I've only read about the first 25 pages).
I have also been a connoisseur of Bret Easton Ellis' podcast. He's an author who made a big splash in the late '80s with Less Than Zero and a certain degree of notoriety with American Psycho in the '90s. Of course, he's also written many other novels and essays over a career that has now spanned almost 30 years. On his podcast, he interviews various people from the arts and entertainment and injects his discussions with his own opinions about film, literature, and music. I don't always agree with everything he says (actually I rather often disagree with him--he tends be a bit reactionary on some subjects), but he frequently has something interesting to say. I particularly enjoy his theory of "empire" and "post-empire" America. We are now in "post-empire" America, which has been brought upon by the internet/digital instant gratification society we are currently mired in (of which I find myself a slave--trying to break free of it) . Anyway, that's the gist of what I gather from Ellis' ideas of "empire" and "post-empire."
I hadn't read anything by Ellis. I vaguely remember when Less Than Zero came out--actually remember more about the movie adaptation that was released a few years after the book. But I never saw the movie, even though its story of decadent 1980s teens should have been right up my alley seeing as that is "my generation" (though my life in the grimy Midwest was decidedly different from Less Than Zero's wealthy southern Californians).
Well, I'm being interrupted by real life and will have to get back to this later. So let me just hastily conclude this post by saying that I've started reading Less Than Zero and have a feeling that my middle-aged self will find the characters to be spoiled brats.
Nothing, At. All.
At least nothing from the major mainstream news sources (ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, CNN). If you wanted to hear anything about the ebola epidemic in Africa, you had to really dig for information. It's not as if it was over, either. Though the situation seems to be under control in Liberia, the last I checked it was still a serious problem in Sierra Leone.
Now all we hear about is something called "DeflateGate." Suddenly, The biggest news in the United States are footballs that weren't properly inflated in the AFC championship game (Super Bowl semifinal for anyone who doesn't follow American football) between the New England Patriots and the Indianapolis Colts. The 24-hour news networks like CNN have been treating this ridiculously overblown and ultimately unimportant story like it was a world crisis.
This is the screwy world we live in.
***
I sort of made a new year's resolution to try and get the hell off my phone and read more books, like the old days before, let's say, 2010. To that end, I started reading Don DeLillo's White Noise, a book I've heard lauded for years. Somehow, the book came up somewhere in conversation (perhaps a podcast I was listening to). Well, it's very good. Quite funny. A biting satire of the absurdity of academia (so far anyway--I've only read about the first 25 pages).
I have also been a connoisseur of Bret Easton Ellis' podcast. He's an author who made a big splash in the late '80s with Less Than Zero and a certain degree of notoriety with American Psycho in the '90s. Of course, he's also written many other novels and essays over a career that has now spanned almost 30 years. On his podcast, he interviews various people from the arts and entertainment and injects his discussions with his own opinions about film, literature, and music. I don't always agree with everything he says (actually I rather often disagree with him--he tends be a bit reactionary on some subjects), but he frequently has something interesting to say. I particularly enjoy his theory of "empire" and "post-empire" America. We are now in "post-empire" America, which has been brought upon by the internet/digital instant gratification society we are currently mired in (of which I find myself a slave--trying to break free of it) . Anyway, that's the gist of what I gather from Ellis' ideas of "empire" and "post-empire."
I hadn't read anything by Ellis. I vaguely remember when Less Than Zero came out--actually remember more about the movie adaptation that was released a few years after the book. But I never saw the movie, even though its story of decadent 1980s teens should have been right up my alley seeing as that is "my generation" (though my life in the grimy Midwest was decidedly different from Less Than Zero's wealthy southern Californians).
Well, I'm being interrupted by real life and will have to get back to this later. So let me just hastily conclude this post by saying that I've started reading Less Than Zero and have a feeling that my middle-aged self will find the characters to be spoiled brats.
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